This invention relates to provisioning for a modular server.
An example of a modular server is a so-called blade server that includes a cluster of blades, each of which are dedicated to a single task, such as file sharing, web page serving and caching, secured sockets layer (SSL) encrypting of web communications, transcoding of web page content for smaller displays, or streaming audio and video content.
The behavior of each of the blades in a modular server during boot is governed by its personality, as captured in both persistent and volatile memory areas, such as non-volatile random access memory (NVRAM) data areas of the blade, complimentary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) tokens and data items, and variables in random access memory (RAM). Personality refers to a behavior of a blade that is configured by an end user and includes, for example, default boot order, localization, enabling/disabling features, allocation of resources and authentication information. For the sake of manageability, such personality data is typically stored in memory where it is prone to corruption.